Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Friday December 04, 2009 @05:13PM
from the company-with-a-lot-of-heart(s) dept.

kkleiner writes "Organovo and strategic partner Invetech hope in 2010 to release a commercial version of their 3D organ printer capable of producing very basic tissues like blood vessels. While it is still limited to simple tissue structures (full organs are a long ways off), Organovo plans to deliver the printers to various research institutions interested in organ and tissue production. Working with these institutions, Organovo hopes to one day progress to creating a system that can print organs as easily as other 3D printers print plastic figurines."

This, obviously, will remind several of us SciFi fans of the reconstruction scene in the Fifth Element -- which I am too lazy to track down and link right now, so I'll let some other person whore for the karma instead.

Dammit, you beat me to the reference. I thought the exact same thing. I remember when seeing that scene, thinking, that certainly looks cool, but there's no way it could work like that. After reading about this (admittedly still far from anything like that scene), I almost wonder if it's not that far off from possible.

There was the assumption the extra strands of the genome stored the layout & weights of the brain's connections to encode her native language and motor skills instead of just the bootstrap that humans have.

She was still ignorant of current facts and English, until she speed-read the encyclopedia.

She was ignorant of recent history and English because the background story depicted in the movie happened once every...10 000 years? (I don't remember exactly)

And I didn't see that assumption - they announced "WE HAVE A SURVIVOR!" just after finding the remains of arm; without any foreknowledge about her anatomy. Apparently such "survival" was obvious for them, also when applied to humans. Which don't have "in-arm backup of brain in advanced DNA" (really, how would that evolve / what's the point?)

Arthur C Clarke wrote a story about teleportation called Travel by Wire. He basically followed the development of TV and extended the idea into solid 3D objects. In the story people who had been transmitted when there was noise on the line came out looking like nothing on earth and very little on venus or mars.

I don't think anybody knows what will happen until we have real Artificial Persons walking around. We seem pretty willing to accept that Gorillas, Chimpanzees and Orangutans are animals with no rights.

Trust me, as long as they can snag a millionaire by bleaching their hair, bobbing their nose, and "enhancing" their breasts, women will continue to do so (and yes, the sister of one of my girlfriends did exactly that). If there was no demand, there would be no supply.

If, when this technology has become sufficiently advanced, will a heart that is produced be, in fact, a living organ? Is it enough to put all of the materials in the right place? It's not clear to me that a heart removed from a cadaver will serve to complete a heart transplant surgery. Just how well does this work?

If, when this technology has become sufficiently advanced, will a heart that is produced be, in fact, a living organ?

Yes it will be living. Life is just a big, complex chemical reaction (well, system of interacting chemical reactions, but still). There is nothing mysterious or supernatural about something being alive or dead. Besides, they're building the tissues using living cells grown in culture; the printer just arranges them to form a tissue.

has some interesting answers about transplantation of kidneys it seems the ideal kidney is transplanted where the brain is dead but the heart is still beating. Kidneys can be taken after the heart has stopped beating but needs to be extracted pretty rapidly.

I understand that when a coronary artery is blocked (that is a heart attack) after 20 - 30 minutes the heart starts t

You need a good extracellular matrix (or as they say, "scaffold") to make good multicellular tissue or organ. Ideally, if the cells are correct for the application - and given the right stimuli - they will eventually make their own matrix for the application.

One thing they didn't mention in this writeup that many people could truly benefit from, though, is that the printer could potentially make better organs than the ones being replaced. Another poster here asked about heart valves - the printer could potentially print a heart with better valves than the problem heart (which could be more beneficial to the patient than replacing only the valves).